Wednesday, 25 January 2017

Prothero's Guide to Prehistoric Mammals

Princeton University Press ISBN: 9780691156828

This is an admirable effort to teach extinct mammals by showing them in context with extant species. I found it helpful to view fossil skulls and skeletons alongside photos of familiar animals. As an additional aid, most chapters have one or more phylogenetic trees culled from the recent literature. Of course, there are extinct orders with a tenuous connection to living ones; inevitably a long chapter deals with orders that do not fit any scheme (e.g. Dinocerata).﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿

Skeleton of Eobasileus - from the Order Dinocerata, which is difficult to place in the mammalian tree.Galerie de Paléontologie et d'Anatomie Comparée, Paris.

Donald R. Prothero is an experienced author and has penned a well written and informative text. The illustrations by Mary Persis Williams reconstruct the body forms of prehistoric mammals, usually with several in the same figure and with a human silhouette to give a sense of scale. These drawings are quite restrained compared to those of Velizar Simeonovski in Horned Armadillos and Extinct Madagascar (the cover is an exception).

The book is aimed at a broad readership as "Princeton Field Guide" might suggest. The publishers have encouraged depiction of large and spectacular mammals at the expense of smaller ones. There is poor coverage of rodents. On the other hand it is the large fossils that are on display in museums of natural history.

Reconstruction of the ground sloth Eremotherium.Exhibit in the Fernbank Museum of Natural History,Atlanta, Georgia. Photo by Daderot (CC0)

Indeed, a field guide to fossils might be useful on museum visits. Yet though there are many excellent photos of exhibits, the museums are not identified. The two pages of Illustration Credits are of little help. The credit line to the above Eremotherium figure is merely "Daderot/Wikimedia Commons." Figures showing phylogenetic trees suffer from a similar deficiency. One from the rodent chapter is credited to E.T. Prothero. It is redrawn from a paper on the Laotian rock rat (Laonastes) by Huchon et al. (here). The reader is ill served by not being guided to the source papers.